From: "Macavity"
Subject: Press Release - Gay Survey
Date: Sat, 11 Sep 1999 15:51:02 -0400
Announcing
The First International, Internet Survey
of Gay & Lesbian Coming Out Experiences
- Please publicize this information -
I need your help to get this information to the gay community. I am
asking for your assistance in distributing this information through your
readership/membership/publications or a link to your webpage etc.
I am writing to inform you of a survey which has been posted on the
Internet to survey the "coming out" experiences of LGBT people. It is
being conducted for three reasons:
1.. A couple of friends and I got talking and thought it would be
interesting to do
2.. I'm collecting data for a book/series of articles based on the
survey results
3.. I think that the information would be valuable to have for a
number of reasons
What I'm doing has not yet been done before to my knowledge. I've done
some research on the On-Line bookstores and have only been able to find
books about coming out that deal with either people's stories or
situationally-specific coming out experiences (i.e.. coming out in the
military, to your wife, if you're lesbian, at work, etc). I think that I
am attempting something new. I am not interested in simply creating a
collection of coming out stories. That has been done.
In my daily work, I design, administer and analyze surveys for clients.
My area of expertise is survey design and analysis. So what I'm now
attempting is to survey every gay person with Internet access that I can
inform about this survey and produce what may well be the first set of
internationally collected statistics about gay people and their coming
out experiences.
These are the sorts of things I'm asking people.
a.. How old were you when you came out?
b.. What year did you come out?
c.. Did you come out by choice or were you outed?
d.. Did coming out cause you to have to relocate?
I hope to be able to produce valid, reliable statistics about gay people
and the "global" experiences associated with coming out. I'd like to
eventually have the study published in the Journal of Homosexuality and
other academic journals. If I'm right and I'm the first to have
attempted this, it might be ground-breaking research and precedent
setting.
Here is the link to my site - the survey is live on the web now.
http://members.execulink.com/~macavity/index.html
Please bear in mind, the website is a "personal" site and was created
long before the idea for the survey popped up, thus, it's a little less
"professional" in tone than I'd like (but I had to post the survey
somewhere!)
Last point. Although I am gay and am out - I am preserving my
confidentiality out of consideration for my parents (who I am out to and
who know about this survey). I am doing this for the same reasons that
John Reid wrote "The Best Little Boy In The World" under the pen name
"Andrew Tobias". My choice to be active in the gay community and to
conduct this research should not have to be achieved at their expense by
forcing them out of the closet as well. They would prefer that I
maintain a low profile. Therefore, please forgive me for not signing my
name.
Thanks for your time and consideration.
MaCavity
macavity@execulink.com